5 ms·

The article further explains why that may not work out. To quote: > the industry is betting on advanced nuclear reactors to save the day. > It’s a bad bet.

The article further explains why that may not work out. To quote: > the industry is betting on advanced nuclear reactors to save the day. > It’s a bad bet. The main points: > The advanced and small modular reactors (SMRs) under development face a raft of economic, regulatory, technological and temporal risks. and > The advanced reactor closest to market in the U.S. is being developed by NuScale, which has a nonbinding agreement to build a first-of-its-kind SMR project in Idaho. The company has already raised its projected power cost from $58 per megawatt-hour to $89, even though it’s still years away from even beginning construction. and > Advanced reactors such as TerraPower’s Natrium, which are significantly different in design from existing light-water reactors, face an even steeper regulatory climb. And they’ll have to contend with broken or nonexistent supply chains because the more highly concentrated uranium fuels used by most advanced reactors are currently unavailable in large quantities outside of Russia. Which leads to this summary at the end: > Regardless of rosy messaging from DOE and the industry, it’s almost certain that Vogtle 3 and 4 are going to be the last big nuclear reactors coming online in the U.S. for a long time.

wkat4242 4y ago
Yeah here in Holland they have the same pipe dream. They want to start new reactors rise should come online by 2040, delays obviously not included. It's a big bullet point for the hard right party VVD that think this way they can continue business as usual. But it'll come way too late for that. All the hard choices will already have been made by that. I'm sure their buddy's corporations will have some nice pork from it though. Such prestige projects always tend to double their budget at least. And then we have the fuel, waste storage and the cleanup which are usually not even factored into the cost but absorbed by society.
- belorn 4y ago
  We will see in 2040 if countries who made a different decision has lower carbon footprint. There is seemingly a lot of countries betting that green hydrogen will become energy storage solution in 20-30-50 years, and thus they can use natural gas/coal while waiting and continue with business as usual. Only time will tell which bets in the energy grid was good and which was bad for the environment. The last bet that many countries did on buying natural gas from Russia ended up being quite bad for Europe.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    Hydrogen is just as much of a pipe dream IMO. Producing, compressing is all very inefficient and it leaks through its tanks quickly. Which is a real big problem not only because of the energy wasted but because it's a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 is! The bet on buying natural gas was a bad one for the environment for the start obviously, no matter whom we bought it from.
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      There's a lot of bad faith pearl clutching over hydrogen, but industry already makes and uses 700 cubic kilometers (if measured at STP) of the gas each year, so obviously the problem of manipulating it is solvable. I read that the cost of a hydrogen pipeline might be about 8% higher than the cost of a natural gas pipeline, per unit of energy transportation capacity.
      - wkat4242 4y ago
        Most of that gas comes from cracking fossil fuels which is much more efficient. But does contribute to climate change. I just don't see it really solving anything at a large scale. Perhaps for some applications like perhaps airplanes but for many others just using batteries would be a much better option.
        pfdietz 4y ago
        The point is not where the gas comes from, the point is that we have pipes, valves, compressors, sensors, etc. etc. that can handle it. Hand wringing about how the stuff is impossible to work with is just nonsense. Some care is needed with materials. Batteries are of course a better option for short term storage and probably most vehicles. But there are storage use cases where hydrogen is far superior to batteries, such as very long term energy storage.
  - _hypx 4y ago
    Green hydrogen is a good idea, but it doesn't excuse us from coming up with alternatives. We still want more than one solution to tackle the climate change issue.
- bjourne 4y ago
  The situation may be analogous in Sweden. Building nuclear reactors was a huge part of the right-wing parties campaign. They even promised to start construction 100 days after they won the election. Unsurprisingly that promise fell through. No private companies have been willing to invest in nuclear and, thankfully, the government has not yet decided to plow hundreds of billions of taxpayer money into new reactors. Imo it's all culture war populism. Renewable energy and saving the planet is for little girls, nuclear power and driving fossil fuel cars is for real men or something.
Maursault 4y ago
Wishful thinking. The problem with nuclear energy is not is not the risk of meltdown. It is not the waste, not directly. The problem is economics. Light water fission reactors are the least expensive nuclear reactors we know of, and even these can not break even. Every other design is even more expensive. For nuclear energy to work it must be profitable. Economics is nuclear energy's Achilles' heel, and its only hurdle.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  That's what people thought in 1980. A big part of the high cost of the LWR is the cost of the steam turbine and associated heat exchangers (a typical PWR has several of those, each of which is as big as the reactor vessel) These very large systems inflate the balance of system costs such as the size of both the confinement and auxillary buildings. It's no accident that they stopped building coal burning power plants at the same time they stopped building nuclear plants. Neither one could compete with the low capital cost of gas turbine power plants fueled with methane. Old literature expected that HTGR power plants with steam turbines might be able to beat the LWR in economics, that fast breeder reactors would be more fuel efficient but have higher capital costs. Today there is some expectation that a fast reactor with a closed cycle gas turbine could undercut the capital cost of an LWR. Now that kind of gas turbine is not a bird in the hand and will take some development, but the potential reward is huge... Such a turbine would almost fit in the employee break room of the turbine house of an LWR.
  - philipkglass 4y ago
    Nuclear plant and coal plant construction didn't really stop at the same time, though. In the early 21st century before the fracking boom took off in the US, natural gas prices were rising. This spurred a small spurt of new coal plant construction in the US. Their operating start dates cluster around 2010 though construction starts were earlier: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30812 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30812 The bad news is that coal fired power can be cheaper than gas fired power when gas prices are high. If coal and nuclear alike were dominated by the cost of steam equipment, we should have seen a similar burst of nuclear reactors starting to operate in the US around that time. Nuclear power plants are sadly more expensive to build and operate than coal plants. The good news is that falling costs for renewables and storage make it very unlikely that the US will build any more coal-fired plants on economic grounds.
Accujack 4y ago
>The article further explains why that may not work out. The article is basically anti-nuclear propaganda, with its conclusions based on the same lack of understanding and fear that's always been the problem. I wouldn't be surprised to see the US extend the life of existing nuclear plants and potentially even build a few more of the old design when push comes to shove. In time climate change will force the government to act, and if the new reactor types aren't ready and the needed breakthroughs in energy storage plus the needed world wide smart grid to enable renewables, there won't be another choice.

wkat4242 4y ago

Yeah here in Holland they have the same pipe dream. They want to start new reactors rise should come online by 2040, delays obviously not included. It's a big bullet point for the hard right party VVD that think this way they can continue business as usual. But it'll come way too late for that. All the hard choices will already have been made by that. I'm sure their buddy's corporations will have some nice pork from it though. Such prestige projects always tend to double their budget at least. And then we have the fuel, waste storage and the cleanup which are usually not even factored into the cost but absorbed by society.

belorn 4y ago
We will see in 2040 if countries who made a different decision has lower carbon footprint. There is seemingly a lot of countries betting that green hydrogen will become energy storage solution in 20-30-50 years, and thus they can use natural gas/coal while waiting and continue with business as usual. Only time will tell which bets in the energy grid was good and which was bad for the environment. The last bet that many countries did on buying natural gas from Russia ended up being quite bad for Europe.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Hydrogen is just as much of a pipe dream IMO. Producing, compressing is all very inefficient and it leaks through its tanks quickly. Which is a real big problem not only because of the energy wasted but because it's a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 is! The bet on buying natural gas was a bad one for the environment for the start obviously, no matter whom we bought it from.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    There's a lot of bad faith pearl clutching over hydrogen, but industry already makes and uses 700 cubic kilometers (if measured at STP) of the gas each year, so obviously the problem of manipulating it is solvable. I read that the cost of a hydrogen pipeline might be about 8% higher than the cost of a natural gas pipeline, per unit of energy transportation capacity.
    - wkat4242 4y ago
      Most of that gas comes from cracking fossil fuels which is much more efficient. But does contribute to climate change. I just don't see it really solving anything at a large scale. Perhaps for some applications like perhaps airplanes but for many others just using batteries would be a much better option.
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        The point is not where the gas comes from, the point is that we have pipes, valves, compressors, sensors, etc. etc. that can handle it. Hand wringing about how the stuff is impossible to work with is just nonsense. Some care is needed with materials. Batteries are of course a better option for short term storage and probably most vehicles. But there are storage use cases where hydrogen is far superior to batteries, such as very long term energy storage.
- _hypx 4y ago
  Green hydrogen is a good idea, but it doesn't excuse us from coming up with alternatives. We still want more than one solution to tackle the climate change issue.
bjourne 4y ago
The situation may be analogous in Sweden. Building nuclear reactors was a huge part of the right-wing parties campaign. They even promised to start construction 100 days after they won the election. Unsurprisingly that promise fell through. No private companies have been willing to invest in nuclear and, thankfully, the government has not yet decided to plow hundreds of billions of taxpayer money into new reactors. Imo it's all culture war populism. Renewable energy and saving the planet is for little girls, nuclear power and driving fossil fuel cars is for real men or something.

Maursault 4y ago

Wishful thinking. The problem with nuclear energy is not is not the risk of meltdown. It is not the waste, not directly. The problem is economics. Light water fission reactors are the least expensive nuclear reactors we know of, and even these can not break even. Every other design is even more expensive. For nuclear energy to work it must be profitable. Economics is nuclear energy's Achilles' heel, and its only hurdle.

PaulHoule 4y ago
That's what people thought in 1980. A big part of the high cost of the LWR is the cost of the steam turbine and associated heat exchangers (a typical PWR has several of those, each of which is as big as the reactor vessel) These very large systems inflate the balance of system costs such as the size of both the confinement and auxillary buildings. It's no accident that they stopped building coal burning power plants at the same time they stopped building nuclear plants. Neither one could compete with the low capital cost of gas turbine power plants fueled with methane. Old literature expected that HTGR power plants with steam turbines might be able to beat the LWR in economics, that fast breeder reactors would be more fuel efficient but have higher capital costs. Today there is some expectation that a fast reactor with a closed cycle gas turbine could undercut the capital cost of an LWR. Now that kind of gas turbine is not a bird in the hand and will take some development, but the potential reward is huge... Such a turbine would almost fit in the employee break room of the turbine house of an LWR.
- philipkglass 4y ago
  Nuclear plant and coal plant construction didn't really stop at the same time, though. In the early 21st century before the fracking boom took off in the US, natural gas prices were rising. This spurred a small spurt of new coal plant construction in the US. Their operating start dates cluster around 2010 though construction starts were earlier: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30812 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30812 The bad news is that coal fired power can be cheaper than gas fired power when gas prices are high. If coal and nuclear alike were dominated by the cost of steam equipment, we should have seen a similar burst of nuclear reactors starting to operate in the US around that time. Nuclear power plants are sadly more expensive to build and operate than coal plants. The good news is that falling costs for renewables and storage make it very unlikely that the US will build any more coal-fired plants on economic grounds.

Accujack 4y ago

>The article further explains why that may not work out. The article is basically anti-nuclear propaganda, with its conclusions based on the same lack of understanding and fear that's always been the problem. I wouldn't be surprised to see the US extend the life of existing nuclear plants and potentially even build a few more of the old design when push comes to shove. In time climate change will force the government to act, and if the new reactor types aren't ready and the needed breakthroughs in energy storage plus the needed world wide smart grid to enable renewables, there won't be another choice.